‘Baltic Sea needs to be centre of attention of Nato'

Nato representatives are invited to discuss the security of offshore wind at an event on 10 April 2024 in the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius as the Baltic country prepares to announce the winner of its second 700MW offshore wind tender.

“We think that all of the Baltic Sea needs to be the centre of attention of Nato,” Daiva Garbaliauskaitė, deputy energy minister of Lithuania, said at a panel at the WindEurope conference in Bilbao.

We “need the best advice on what innovations and technologies are to be installed in order to [reach] a maximum of security above the water and below the water.”

The conference will talk about goals and threats all Baltic Sea countries face, including cyber security, and discuss which lessons can be learned from Ukraine about the safety of critical infrastructure.

Military concerns are a sensitive issue in the Baltic Sea and have been heightened further since Russia invaded Ukraine, possible Russian spy vessels have been detected mapping the sea ground, and sabotage acts against the Nord Stream gas pipelines in 2022 were carried out.

Lithuania – a former Soviet republic – has been hurrying to switch its energy system to renewables to rid itself of Russian energy imports. Three quarters of the country’s installed electricity generation capacity is already from renewables, the minister said.

But Garbaliauskaitė also lamented that there is “a little bit of fog and declarations” among countries surrounding the Baltic Sea, which sometimes are “

Lithuania’s National Energy Regulatory Council (NERC) is slated to announce the winner of the second offshore wind tender on 14 April 2024. Under the terms of the tender, interested parties will be able to develop the array with or without contract for difference (CfD) support. The price ceiling at the auction is €107.18 ($115.70) per MWh.